sIFR3 – Not New but Still Cool

I just added a page to my brenz.net demonstrating how easy it is to incorporate sIFR for swapping out text with flash to use custom fonts on your website. This is great for page headings, Read article »

Tiny Tooltips – Dynamic tooltips for your website

Use this lightweight javascript widget to easily add interactive tooltips to your website. Tiny Tooltips can be used as a glossary to define key terms, or simply to provide additional information that appears when the user moves his cursor over a hyperlink or keyword. Read article »

The Freshest News Headlines – Free!

Here’s a free and easy solution to generate dynamic content for your website that is automatically (and effortlessly!) updated – check out RSSMall.com. This website has a growing list of many popular RSS news feeds, which you can browse freely right on the website. Adding these feeds to your own website or blog is as easy as selecting a feed (http://www.rssmall.com/get-rss-scripts.asp), clicking the Get Code button, and copy/pasting the one line of javascript into your HTML where you want the feed headlines to appear. Next thing you know – Kapow! – RSS feed headlines are on your website!

XAMPP for Windows – Fast and Easy

Looking for a quick and relatively painless way to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP (as well as additional mods like Perl) on your windows XP box? If you’re stuck running Windows XP Home, resentful that only XP Pro offers Internet Information Server, or IIS, then XAMPP may be just what you’re looking for. XAMPP offers a nice solution that will have you running a webserver/database combo capable of serving up dynamic PHP content in just a few minutes. Read article »

Wow! I was pretty impressed the first couple of times I went to Google today and noticed they changed their logo to a Pac-Man game. But it wasn’t until the second or third time using their search engine that I realized the logo is a PLAYABLE PAC-MAN GAME!! Read article »

Getting free tools and add-ons rules!

There are tons of add-ons (aka plugins or extensions) for the Firefox browser which are easy to install and provide economical (i.e., free) tools to help you with your everyday development tasks. In this article I’ll introduce you to the two add-ons I use most regularly – Web Developer and Firebug. I use only a fraction of their capabilities, but this should give you a sense of their power, and whether these add-ons are right for you. Read article »

Hotkeys Aren’t Just for Geeks

There was a time not so long ago that I considered keyboard shortcuts, or hotkeys, to be the sole domain of I.T. folks – used only by the System Administrators of this world. With increased exposure to these nifty time-savers, I’ve grown quite fond of hotkeys, and they really do come in handy. When you’re using software which requires heavy typing (programming, documentation, authoring, etc.), grabbing for that mouse just to click a menu item becomes bothersome. There are three types of shortcut combinations I commonly use, Ctrl+ (control), Alt+ (alternate) and Win+ (Windows) shortcuts. Sorry Mac users, I’m currently using Windows exclusively, so some topics may be specific to the Windows environment.Read article »